It's not all about self-control. Children's decisions are driven instead by the forces of evidence and expectations.
“Starting in the late 1960s, a group of researchers led by then Stanford professor Walter Mischel offered young children a choice: one marshmallow now or two later. Mischel and colleagues used this paradigm to study the efficacy of behavioral interventions for enhancing self-control, and they were quite prolific.
It wasn’t those original studies, however, that really got people excited about the marshmallow test. It was a discovery that came decades later. While most children failed to wait for the second marshmallow, those who did went on in life to achieve great things. Kids who waited for the second marshmallow grew up to score better on their SATs and have more friends. They had less body fat, and lower risks of both substance abuse and incarceration. They had better lives.
This work has been popularly interpreted to mean that self-control is the driving force behind all of these wonderful outcomes—the “engine of success” to use Mischel’s own words. The kind of kid who can resist the impulse to grab the first marshmallow could grow up to be the kind of teenager who resisted the impulse to flip on the TV in lieu of studying for their exams. It is an especially alluring tale because it makes the answer to really complex problems seem suspiciously simple. Teach children self-control, and everything wonderful in life will follow.
When I first heard about the marshmallow test, I was working with children in a homeless shelter and my heart sank. I knew that the children with whom I worked would fail abysmally. These children had habits of breaking toys, pouring entire containers of glue and paint onto their papers, and devouring sweets as rapidly as their throats could manage. Like Mischel and his colleagues, these children’s caseworkers observed these behaviors as maladaptive. And so did I, I am now embarrassed to admit.
Here is why we were wrong: The apparent failures of self-control were actually well calibrated to those children’s everyday realities. Waiting for a second marshmallow is only adaptive if you have a strong reason to believe that the second marshmallow will arrive as promised. If you have less certainty, say, because your everyday reality has taught you that you should, you would be better off to go with the shorter-term, guaranteed treat instead.”
